Part 1—on Ritual

What is Ritual?

What interests me is not so much Christian ritual and power, but the power of Christian ritual. (Asad 1993, 84)

Amongst the most prominent characteristics of religious phenomena are, and always have been, ritual and ceremonial behaviour (Margolin 2021, 1). The term ritual comes from the Latin words ritus and ritualis, which refer, respectively, “to prescribed ceremonial order for a liturgical service and to the book that lays out this order” (Bell 2009, 399). However, for the purposes of this article, critical emphasis will be put on the predominant modern sense given to the word ritual, which represents it as a form of communicative, symbolic behaviour (Asad 1993, 55–57). Herein, ritual is characterized as a socially embedded public code that is legible, whose study (anthropologically and sociologically) is a task of decoding the symbols involved and interpreting their various functions. This is done to gain an understanding of the group performing these rituals (Asad 1993).

As communicative, such rituals are taken as expressing the public face of religion. Spirituality and interior faith are generally excluded in this approach to ritual (Asad 1993). In fact, the private and ineffable are set up as a direct contrast to ritual, the latter of which is taken as the paradigm of what is public and legible. As Asad puts it, in this predominant approach, ritual gets conceived of “as a language by which private things become publicly accessible because they can be represented … as visible behavioural form” (Asad 1993, 73, 77).

Examining what kind of language ritual involves is part of the task of this article. Even though rituals generally do use language (i.e., words), one should wonder about the sense in which the symbolic performances do constitute a language, as if verbal meanings can be simply read off from ritual gestures, translated neatly and wholly directly from the ritual gestures into some clear verbal form. The assumption with the construction of ritual as communicative is that there is some 1‐2‐1 relationship with the symbolic meanings being performed. This article will not dispute that rituals can be communicative, but does dispute that such communication is readily translated into verbal format. Are ritual gestures merely fancy ways of expressing what one could just have said in words? Or, are there some layers of meaning being communicated in ritual that cannot be readily translated directly into words, that are simply not verbal in nature? This article will assume that ritual conveys meanings on many levels, verbal and nonverbal alike. All this must be taken into account when making statements indicating that ritual is a language.

Apart from the symbolic communicative approach to ritual, another tendency is to look at ritual as a merely functional activity, asking: what is it that ritual achieves for persons and groups? What is the payoff? As Stark (2009, 60) writes, rituals are public goods. Participation in ritual performances can be construed as an instrument of social‐bonding and faith‐building. ² Intimate bonds are created—on mental, bodily and biochemical levels—that weave communities together, which galvanize their faith. Stark writes:

As for rituals, social scientists are unanimous that participation in them builds faith. Even Durkheim admitted that the “apparent function [of ritual] is to strengthen the bonds attaching the believer to his god” … Of course, he quickly added that what ritual really does “is strengthen the bonds attaching the individual to society, since God is only a figurative expression of society.” (Stark 2009, 56)

The idea that ritual is a potent means for building habits of comportment, of hard‐wiring various traits and affective responses, is certainly the notion of Christian ritual held by Immanuel Kant. For Kant, rituals are “merely preparations for making our dispositions practice … rightful external action of moral inner dispositions … means for the continual stimulation of the disposition within us” (Stroud 2014, 171). Religious rituals are, in practical terms, simply “rhetorical, persuasive ways of performing the moral disposition in communal settings” (Stroud 2014, 140). Again, ritual represents that which is public and shared. As a training in dispositions and affectations, for Kant, ritual performance is a kind of training of oneself for action in the public social world. Traditions and the various mythic narratives involved form a common, shared activity—the individual's conformity to the ethical universal.

Other commentators present ritual as a kind of theatre, a drama, a site of re‐enactment. It is argued that such a drama‐concept of ritual does more justice to ritual's ancient roots, where religious participants would act out the rebirth of the Sun, or the death of a god, and so on (Bell 2009, 402). Herein, “emphasis on the performative aspects of ritual (script, drama, roles) attempts to discern how these qualities can have both social and individual effects” (Bell 2009, 404, 406). As Asad puts it: “ritual in the sense of a sacred performance [is] the manner in which it is (literally) played out” (Asad 1993, 50, italics added). The manner of the performance literally constitutes the ritual as sacred theatre. Here one has ritual “as a structured event” in which groups participate as social activities (Asad 1993, 127).

While it can be helpful to view rituals as ways of cultivating dispositions for action and feeling, or as a dramatic theatre, those perspectives can be limiting too. Reducing ritual in those ways falls foul of the same problem to be raised throughout this article: Christian ritual should not be treated as a religious epiphenomenon, a set of functional tools or dramatic vignettes, merely added onto the doctrinal propositions, a fancy way of communicating pregiven, preformulated religious abstractions in colorful gestural format. That assumes a unidirectional view of ritual, what one might call an outside‐in fallacy, as if the only meaning that could be in ritual is that which has been explicitly put into it from the outside.

Ritual should not be construed as a mere translation from verbal proposition to physical gesture. Ritual is not merely a fancy way of expressing what one has already figured out through intellectual means (though it can be that, too). Instead, ritual practice can also be generative of meaning, and involves attending to levels of meaning which evade being translated too readily in verbal terms. There is something in the practice of ritual itself which is informative, which allows new and deeper meanings to arise. So far from ritual being a set of fancy gestures used to act out some pregiven doctrinal ideas, ritual involves meaning that cannot be easily put into words. The struggle, then, is how to put such experiential meaning into words—that is, assuming one even wishes to give a verbal account of the rich layers of meaning one's finds in the participation of ritual itself.

Finally, to clarify one last sense of the word ritual that this article is seeking to set itself apart from, one can point to the recent, wholly secular interest in ritual. In some popular literature, ritual has been reconstituted as a form of meditation. Ritual becomes a way of temporarily shutting down one's chattering and anxious mind by mindfully following a certain routine or set of procedures. A sportsperson prepares his or her equipment, a marksman polishes the rifle, a chef lays out the knives. Ritual becomes a method of relaxation, of grounding oneself, of gaining focus. As Bowie writes: “both primitive rituals and secular rites … serve as focusing mechanisms or mnemonics. Obsessively packing and repacking a suitcase before a holiday will not make the weekend come any sooner but can help the traveler focus” (Bowie 2009, 21). ³ This sense of the word ritual, though significant, is not the sense intended in this article. Here, it is precisely the interplay between verbal and nonverbal kinds of meaning that is of interest, rather than the quietening of the verbal so as to rest more fully in the experiential world. It is the interplay of verbal and experiential that many Christian rituals facilitate, if attentively performed.

All of this is to barely touch on the literature of religious ritual. In fact, the literature on ritual is so broad and covers so wide a set of phenomena, one is tempted to agree with Asad in his remarking that he is “skeptical of ritual as the object of a general theory” (Asad 1993, 130). The point in selecting these particular approaches is to separate them from what remains to be discussed. While all the above approaches offer important perspectives on ritual, this article is concerned with meaning. Specifically, the concern here is on multiple layers of meaning (verbal and nonverbal) and how they interact in religious ritual. The concern is less to do with dramatic re‐enactment, nor social bonding, nor disposition‐training, nor ritual as a set of calming, repetitive things‐to‐do. For all their value, the concern here is with how ritual opens up, and makes possible, an integration between different semantic levels in nourishing religious understanding. In short: The rest of the article will explore how the human capacity to appreciate meaning on separate levels, verbal and nonverbal, works to deepen religious understanding through ritual practice.

Part 2—Ritual and Embodiment

Coding and Meaning‐Systems

Overlapping with embodied cognition research are dual process theories of cognition (for a comprehensive overview, see Sherman, Bertram and Yaacov 2014). One of the basic premises of dual process (and dual‐system) cognitive accounts, which make them fitting for the present discussion, is their construction of how two separate meaning‐systems in human beings. In fine: humans are able to apprehend and work with different kinds of meaning which are stored in completely different formats, have different qualities, and operate in completely different ways. Because of this, humans have scope to represent ideas to themselves in a layered manner. Ideas have various semantic dimensions, of which the familiar, verbal, dimension is but one.

There are many dual process models in the cognitive and social psychological discourses. Generally, these models fall into one of two camps, splitting semantic coding either into a dichotomy between “perceptual versus conceptual” codes, or between “associative versus propositional” codes (Moors 2014, 25). Crudely speaking, these dichotomies mark out the difference between verbal and nonverbal information. Regarding the first dichotomy, perceptual codes are characterized as being more picture‐like in nature, as being grounded in sensory inputs. The related cognitive systems code perceptual features, they are concrete and specific, they are rooted in the context in which the information was perceived, and tend to be rather particular and static (Moors 2014, 24). For example, if one has a memory of one's dog, the memories coded in the perceptual system are tied to that dog specifically, in the specific place where that memory happened, tied together with the particular feelings, sights and smells which arose during that experience. Perceptually coded representations are, again, embodied, and they have motor features, so that when activated (remembered), the code leads to a partial re‐enactment or simulation of the coded item. Activation of one feature of a terrifying moment, for example, can trigger a total bodily re‐enactment of that situation. This can be seen in debilitating phobias, and, in extreme cases, such re‐enactment can signify post‐traumatic stress disorder. That such activation is grounded in the perceptual system is one reason why talking treatments—verbally‐coded meaning—are usually so ineffective, if used in isolation.

In contrast, conceptual codes are verbally driven. Conceptually coded information is more flexible in the sense that it can be increasingly abstracted from the particular concrete features in which that concept arose. With a concept of a dog, one can step back from one's memory of a particular dog and start applying abstract features of that memory to broader categories of information. Such propositional information is also truth‐evaluable in a way that perceptual information is not (propositions can be assigned binary values: true/false, whereas perceptual information is generally just more or less striking, more or less immediate, more or less clear). The more abstracted from the perceptual bases a concept becomes, the more it can be removed from context, separated into portions, and then more generally applied. Obviously, this power of abstraction can be incredibly valuable and incredibly problematic, depending on how and when it is used. Finally, because propositional information can be abstracted into parts and categories, they facilitate a particular kind of creativity. Propositions and concepts, Moors writes, “comprise meaningful parts that can be recombined with other parts to form new representations” (Moors 2014, 25).

These two‐system accounts are of tremendous significance for providing a cognitive account of Christian ritual. It should be immediately clear that the practice of many Christian rituals—their participatory quality—activates both verbal and nonverbal semantic powers in very striking ways, providing a wealth of stimulation of both verbal and nonverbal kinds. One cognitive model which is particularly helpful for exploring these cognitive dimensions is Philip Barnard and John Teasdale's Interacting Cognitive Subsystems (ICS) model (Barnard and Teasdale 1991). ICS, unlike most dual systems theories, is less concerned with fast and slow types of functioning, and more concerned with this fundamental distinction between the two kinds of meaning‐system that humans have available to them. The ICS term for this dichotomy is propositional versus implicational kinds of meaning (Barnard and Teasdale 1991, 2). Propositional meaning has been dealt with above, corresponding broadly with the verbal system. Implicational meaning, like the perceptual coding‐system, deals with somatic and bodily information (smells, tastes, emotions, and so on). The work of the implicational system is to integrate the various inputs coming from the various sensory systems into a meaningful whole. ⁶

This meaningful whole, implicational meaning, is then capable of interacting with the verbal meaning‐system. Though, it is better to say that abstract and verbal meaning is grounded in, and emerges out of, meanings encoded at the bodily and somatic level. According to Barnard, while human and many nonhuman animals alike have this implicational system (Barnard 2019, 43)—the unified meaningful whole of their perceptual experience—only humans have an additional conceptual system that is capable of interacting with that implicational information. This is more than just saying that humans are different from animals because they have a verbal, conceptual system. One of the distinctive differences between animals and humans is not just the presence of a conceptual system, but the potential for interaction between these two meaning‐systems. It is in the interaction that the richness of human meaning arises. For the most part, these two meaning‐systems operate together, in a layered manner, so that implicational meaning and propositional meaning are involved in some constant dynamic engagement. The way one experiences one's world shapes the way one talks about one's world. Likewise, the way one conceptualizes one's world changes the way one experiences it. Bodily and conceptual knowledge are generally shaping and reshaping each other all the time (or rather, as Teasdale puts it, they are constantly “updating” each other, as new situations provide new information about what the person should be paying attention to [Teasdale 2016]). ⁷

As such, the world of experience cannot be treated merely as a set of neutral stimuli, a set of inputs being poured into the brain through the senses, which are then intellectually apprehended in some detached or spectatorial manner by the knowing subject. Rather, with the layering of meaning‐systems, one's world of experience is in an integral relationship with one's concepts and ideas. Or, to put it better, the two meaning‐systems should be working in a closely integrated manner. It is worth noting that one of the most popular practical applications of ICS has been in mindfulness‐based therapies (see Segal, Williams and Mark 2012). Though generally interacting quite closely, these two worlds of meaning—verbal and experiential—can go too far apart. A common diagnosis of the contemporary malaise is precisely that one's experience and one's thinking get so radically out of tune. Humans do have this layering of meaning‐systems, but if one is not careful, the power of abstraction gets so out of touch with the world of basic experience, that one's life can start to lose touch with concrete reality.

Indeed, that insight can be taken as a cipher for this spiritual intelligence project.

So much of what is presented as spiritual antidote, East and West, in contemporary culture can be understood as a set of tools for realigning one's perceptual and conceptual selves. The best of these approaches seek to combine both conceptual and experiential worlds in some co‐operative, well‐grounded manner. The worst of these approaches seek to completely do away with one or other kind of meaning, usually the conceptual world, in order to advocate some shallow loss of self to the world of pure immediacy, often under the guise of terms like flow. This is not a new solution. Even Theresa of Avila, though a Carmelite contemplative (which ostensibly suggests a practice of silent abiding in the presence of God), was passionate in her distaste for the no pensar nada approach to religion (Don't think anything!). As Theresa put it: “God gave us faculties for our use; each of them will receive its proper reward; there is no reason, then, for trying to cast a spell over them – they must be allowed to perform their function” ([1588] 2018, 83). Thus, what is needed is some appropriate balance, or synchrony, between the verbal and nonverbal systems, some proper alignment or ordering of the two worlds of meaning, and not some attempt to just subvert one or the other.

Even so, what needs to be highlighted is that, no matter how far apart the two worlds of meaning can diverge from one another, they are still essentially grounded in one another. There is simply no such thing as pure experience, or pure sensation, without having some conceptual shaping in the background. And likewise, one can never really pursue a purely abstract line of thought without it being driven, in some way, by some line of association (consciously or not), or without it being grounded in the sort of processing that only a bodily creature, spatially and temporally located, could possibly have. There is never any complete separation between propositional and implicational knowing because the weight of one's experience is always pushing in from behind, impinging into one's perception, thickening it—even if one is in a state of inward silence. Likewise, one's body is constantly impressing itself on one's thoughts. Thus, in talking about human meaning, the difference between propositional and implicational meaning‐systems will always be a matter of degree—more or less embodied, more or less conceptually shaped—regardless of how divergent, or even oppositional, these worlds of meaning become. This insight might be read as a sign of hope—that it is always possible to restore some kind of rapprochement between one's different meaning‐worlds, because fundamentally, they are grounded in one another, whether one like it or not.

Taking account of the body as offering a variety of kinds of meaningful information has crucial implications for thinking about ritual. Above, it was suggested that there is something like an outside‐in fallacy with how ritual gets conceptualized. In many of its various discourses, there is some idea that ritual is just a fancy set of gestures which express some preformulated set of religious propositions. Once one starts to think of ritual in terms of two meaning‐systems, verbal and perceptual, this notion does not really work. The notion of ritual merely as a set of dramatic gestures communicating preset propositions (that could just as easily have been expressed in words), falls short. It should be understood that the perceptual or experiential aspect of ritual is meaningful in its own right. The performance of ritual is not just a code for verbal meaning, but meaningful in its own experiential manner. It is because experiential meaning is so hard to translate into words that it is easier for theorists to ignore it completely, imagining that the only meaning that can exist in ritual is the verbal sort coded into it from the outset. As Benavides observes: “It might even be suggested that the longevity of the Roman Church stems from its having established and maintained a link between the materiality of its ritual system and its theological speculation” (Benavides 2009, 296). More than that, rituals continue to be performed over the millennia, not because they are just colorful and dramatic ways of acting out a set of words (though it is unsurprising that a verbal‐dominated culture should be prone to thinking that). To the contrary, it is because the rituals are so powerful and meaningful in their own right—even if no one has yet managed to give a rich verbal account of what that meaning is—that the rituals continue to endure. The verbal is built on top of the experiential meaning in ritual. It is a testament to the richness of ritual that, after hundreds (and approaching thousands) of years, more and more verbal accounts of the meaningfulness of rituals continue to be spun. No one has come close to wrapping anything up regarding the meaningfulness of Christian ritual.

Such an insight is lacking from much discourse on ritual, and precisely why psychology of embodiment is such a valuable contribution to that literature.

As participatory, such ritual also connects one with others participating (in corporate rituals, at least) in a more direct manner. The mode of bodily knowing and somatic representations, as implicational, includes deep models of the self, world and others (Teasdale 2016). So far from the meaning of ritual already being coded in from the outside in propositional terms, part of the meaningfulness of ritual is in the sense of connectedness, the shared consciousness that it permits. Meaningfulness arises between the persons engaged in the ritual, one another, and God. The meaningfulness of that connectedness is not in the words or actions of the ritual, but in their being performed together at that moment. In that corporate regard, at least, the words and gestures are not codes at all. Rather, they are the means, the shared structure, the order, by which the meaningfulness of performing a ritual together can arise. In corporate ritual, worshipping others are known directly as copresences (rather than just as objects of theoretical knowledge). In addition to having ideas about the world, and the others one knows, one also knows them directly, by being with them and alongside them.

The difference between coding here is, as noted above, like the difference between reading a book on swimming and actually being in a pool. The perceptual information is much richer in experience, of course, because it includes the entire whirlpool of sensation and all the related associations that might be activated in relation to that experience. It is important to dwell a little on the matter of the dimensionality of the different kinds of information dealt with by the different worlds of meaning. Barnard asserts that: “propositional extractions are like taking a low‐dimensional representation out of a higher‐representational system.” ⁸ This is a somewhat mischievous statement—thinking about the respective valuation of propositional and experiential knowing—because it overturns the priority often given to abstract knowing. Rather than thinking of the intellect as the higher‐representation system (as most theoreticians are liable to do), Barnard is in the tradition of highlighting how abstraction necessitates a reduction of the richness of perceptual information. Intellectual and verbal abstractions offer low‐dimensional representations of the richer, higher‐dimensional experiential world. As Cally Hammond put it, in her work of Christian ritual, there is a need: “to overcome ingrained assumptions of the superiority of verbal over physical in worship, of semantic content (what the words ‘mean’ or ‘signify’) over physical effect and affect … Posture works as the foundation on which the sounds proper to good liturgy are built” (Hammond 2015, 5).

Hammond could have benefitted from taking Barnard's notion that gesture and physical affect involve a semantically‐rich integration of perceptual information in their own right (i.e., are the work of the implicational meaning‐system). Hammond recognizes the importance of affect and physicality, but she misses that they offer meaningful information in themselves. For example, she writes on ritual performance: “Every gesture and posture used in worship is potentially meaningful …” (Hammond 2015, 15), but then finishes that sentence with the qualification: “… in that it encodes worshippers’ beliefs about what matters, and how they express and communicate their understanding” (Hammond 2015). A better way of approaching gesture here is not to think that one has meaning on one side (words) and then has gesture on the other, with the latter being the carrier and code for the former. Rather, both words and gesture are expressive of meaning. It is just two different worlds of meaning that they express. Thus, it is not that there is semantic information on one side and physicality on the other. Both are meaningful, both are semantic. The difference relates to the dimensionality of the representation—also, the difference relates to the codes in which these different forms of meaning are stored, activated and brought to bear (e.g., verbal codes being amodal and abstract; and perceptual codes being modal, contextual and associative).

The popular Zen Buddhist attitude toward verbal representation puts this purported hierarchy of verbal and experiential knowing at its most forceful: words are necessary, they serve a purpose for communication, but, really, they give nothing but a pitifully narrow representation of the full richness of the basic ground of reality (Suzuki 1972, 26). In that view, words and ideas are just crude stick figures standing in place of the fullness of the thing itself. Abstractions are crucial, of course, just so long as those abstractions are fundamentally grounded in the concrete realities that give rise to them, and never stray too far from their concrete bases. It is worth noting that many Zen writers, however, not least the famed DT Suzuki, have not really followed their own advice. The fact is that Zen Buddhism is the Buddhist tradition by far the most critical regarding abstract representations of reality. At the very same time, it is also by far the most verbally prolific in terms of written and highly abstract outputs. More than any other kind of Buddhism, Zen has produced a truly prodigious output of words, a great many of those being highly abstract treatises about the limitations of verbal representation.

In any case, spiritual disputes here relate to the appropriate balance that is to be found between the concrete and abstract worlds of meaning. Verbal and abstract representations each have their integrity, their own dimensions, their own rich possibilities, and are generative in their own right. The question is about finding the right balance—applying the different meaning‐systems richly and appropriately (as Theresa put it, letting each faculty have its reward). This is always a question of discerning where one's spiritual values reside, veering more toward spirituality as a more intellectual pursuit (with Augustine, and his love of words, being a central case in point), or placing greater emphasis on the concrete ground of reality, wishing to remain serenely at the center of the circle, as Taoists, Zen Buddhists, and yogic philosophies will generally tend to advocate.

Embodied Spirituality

In his 2021 text, A Plea for Embodied Spirituality, Fraser Watts writes:

The body is strangely neglected in religious practice. We humans are embodied creatures, so the body is inevitably involved in religion in some way or other. However, there seems to be a strange lack of interest in many circles in how people are using their bodies in religious and spiritual practice, with the result that many religious people don't use them as well or as skilfully as they might. When it comes to religion and spirituality, we just don't, for the most part, operate as though mind and body were integrated facets of a single, whole human person. … for various reasons, including philosophical dualism and moral panic about carnal pleasures, the crucial role of the body in religion is often not fully acknowledged. (Watts 2021, 1–2)

Watts’ text explores many of the different ways the body can impact religious experience, religious knowing and practice. For example, Watts explores the role of postures and positions in spiritual practice, he observes: “Much embodied practice in religion, such as kneeling, seems designed to express feelings, and to encourage an attitude of devotion. Body language in religion can help to induce particular moods and attitudes” (Watts 2021, 8). ⁹ Watts presents: “a sweeping and comprehensive set of doctrinal reasons and mainstream practices for regarding the body as having a central place in the purposes of God and the life of Christians” (Watts 2021, 13). As such, proper acknowledgement and use of the body in religion promises to be transformative, even salvatory (Watts 2021, 2–3).

Following this, it is incumbent to explore ritual as a ground of meaning‐discovery. Ritual is a meaningful ground, full of potential for both conceptual and experiential meaning to be drawn out of it (again, no amount of commentary on the meaning of ritual comes close to wrapping things up—the dimensionality of information in religious ritual is too high). As implicational meaning is higher‐dimensional than conceptual knowledge, every attempt to constrain the meaning found in ritual by putting it into words will necessarily lose a huge amount between the cracks. As the incarnate experience of ritual is translated into verbal code, so much significant information is lost in the verbal representation. However poetic and rich one's verbal articulation of religious ritual is, a vast amount of it has been sheared off in the very act of putting it into words. This is not a call to resist articulating what is going on in religious ritual. The prayerful statements one makes in many ritual practices layer upon the physicality of the ritual. Some sort of feedback occurs. It is in this feedback that the richness of meaning is found.

If there exists something akin to a genuine spiritual instinct in persons, the bodily level can in no way be neglected. When the Psalmist, for example, cries out: My soul thirsts for the Lord and pants for God (Psalm 42, NIV), how far are these statements really metaphors? If there is a genuine spiritual need in some persons (albeit, more or less pronounced from person to person), such cries as these may be very literal indeed. Once one understands that meaning is not just verbal, then one must open oneself to hearing meaning in that which is not articulate, not readily put into verbal form. One is forced to listen in another way, one is forced to listen for that which speaks without words, to those embodied aspects of spiritual need which cry out, though not even having the words with which to cry out—“In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans.” (Romans 8:26, NIV).